Samsung Galaxy NX Mini Pro Reviews

The Samsung NX mini is an impressive camera purely because of the amount of technology that Samsung has managed to place inside such a tiny body. The system may be small (no pun intended) for now but the lenses currently available for the mini are of a high quality, and the camera is capable of excellent results from its 1in sensor. Ultimately, our frustrations with the mini are almost all focused around its user interface, which needs some work before it will appeal to enthusiasts. Right now the mini is a great point-and-shoot with some slightly awkward manual controls but it has the potential to be much more.

The Samsung NX Mini is a compact, Wi-Fi-connected mirrorless camera that runs circles around smartphones, but manual control is a bit of a chore.

The Samsung NX Mini is an interesting camera. It fits the niche area of the market of those looking for something ultra small that they can take manual control of and change the lenses. For the moment, that lens range is small, and it'll presumably be down to consumer demand whether the range is expanded further to include more optics. While the body itself is small, and the kit 9-27mm lens is small when compared to some lenses from other systems, it's not a pocketable device unless you attach one of the pancake lenses. One of the biggest pluses of this camera is its relatively low price. It's cheaper than the Panasonic GM1, but it's not quite as cheap as the Nikon S1, with which it shares a sensor size – the Samsung offers a fair amount more than the S1 though for your money.

The Samsung NX-Mini is an ultra compact mirrorless camera, with a 20 megapixel 1 inch BSI CMOS sensor - it offers detailed images and good noise control. The compact body with excellent Wi-Fi connectivity and an easy to use tilting touch-screen make it an appealing camera, particularly when you consider the relatively low price of £399 that includes a full version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5. The limited range of lenses currently available may deter some, particularly as there are other compact system cameras with a much larger range of lenses, and it would certainly be useful to see a roadmap for future lenses. Despite this, the Samsung NX Mini delivers very good images in a compact body and lens system and offers some of the best Wi-Fi connectivity available. Perhaps the Samsung NX-Mini could give Samsung some real traction in the mirrorless camera market, especially if high quality lenses continue to be released for it. If you are likely to be happy with the lenses currently available then the Samsung NX Mini offers excellent value for money, delivers very good image quality, excellent Wi-Fi connectivity and is well worth looking at.

When we first previewed pre-production samples of the NX Mini, we were blown away by the concept and the size, and thought Samsung could be onto something. The one thing we couldn’t test at the time was image quality. Now that we’ve had one to play with, does the Mini still hold the same appeal that wowed us? Samsung gets the cheers for designing an incredibly small interchangeable lens camera. But, photographically, as a substitute for much larger (and stronger) CSCs and DSLRs, it has enough flaws that stop us from fully recommending it for those users. But, if you’re traditionally a point-and-shoot or smartphone camera user who likes the idea of interchangeable lenses but prefer the slim form-factor – and is willing to sacrifice some image quality for convenience – then the Mini definitely has appeal. We recognize this is a first-gen product and we consider this a warm-up, so we’ll give the company some slack. We do think Samsung is onto something with the NX-M mount, so can’t wait to see the next iteration of the NX Mini, or possibly another product – a smartphone, perhaps – that incorporates this new lens system. Maybe then, we’ll finally see that camera-centric smartphone people have been waiting for.